Friday, June 20, 2014

Empty Spaces: Pushing Back the Boundaries by Virginia A. Tobin

Empty Spaces: Pushing Back
the Boundaries

By Virginia A. Tobin

Reclaiming My
Consciousness

Anything or anyone who
demands your attention on a daily basis becomes personal to you.
Before I became mentally ill, my personal identity was common place
to myself and to the rest of society. Since then, my paranoid
schizophrenia has demanded my attention generally speaking for
approximately 19 years, and has demanded my attention at every level
of my life for most of those years. My mental illness has occupied
the empty spaces and has pushed back the boundaries so that the gaps
of emptiness are much wider than that of a mentally healthy person. I
have come to see that being passive about this invites the mental
illness to become a parasite larger than the host. The time has come
for me to push back the boundaries of emptiness and to allow little
room for the uncommon demand.

My symptoms began in 1995,
unbeknownst to me, creeping up on me with peculiar occurrences, all
culminating in 2007 when I was hearing and seeing ghosts. The onset
of my disability seemed to coincide with my one and only marriage to
a man I had dated in high school. I only know this in retrospect
because I had no clue I was mentally ill until being diagnosed in
2004. My suffering really commenced when my husband left me, without
much explanation, after six months of living together as husband and
wife. I had a profound feeling of not understanding, which stayed
with me, growing for years to come. This feeling of not understanding
eventually became about everything that I experienced on a daily
basis and thus became MY personal definition of the self.

I would not say that I was
lost. I wasn’t. It’s just that this feeling of not understanding
became accompanied by beliefs that I adopted to explain the feeling
itself. This is where I split from the common understanding of the
truth. I began believing that everyone around me was talking
indirectly about me or indirectly to me. Following this, I began
believing that I knew things that the public did not know about local
and world events. Everything I heard, and everything and everyone I
met, soon seemed to be a part of a perfect world in which every last
detail and generality was previously planned from the license plates
of the cars around me to the changing names of countries on the world
map. Putting it simply, I recognized everything in the world. It was
like experiencing the awesome power of God from a demonic
perspective.

One cannot imagine what
this felt like, nor understand how demanding this was on my
attention. I was in a continuous state of shock and not
understanding. This is where my paranoia steps in. I believed that
strangers around me knew who I was and that they were all in on some
kind of great conspiracy concerning me. I believed that spies from
all over the world were watching, listening and following me, that
micro-cams were in my bathroom and a tracking device was inside my
watch. I don’t know when I started to believe there was an implant
in my thumb. This now all seems so gratuitous, of course, since
whoever planned the world’s goings on was so advanced.

I was eventually caught be
the authorities as only mentally ill people will truly understand. In
desperation, I went to the police while I was delusional and
traveling around the country thinking now that I was being chased and
harassed by the mob. The police sent me to the public psychiatrist
where I was officially diagnosed. I immediately noticed that I was
now in a different class of people because I was institutionalized. I
had just relinquished control of my entire life, as a prisoner would
relinquish control to the authorities by being incarcerated. My
instincts were correct. This was only to be the beginning of a long
span of time spent in and out of the mental institution. It seemed
that everyone viewed me as a mentally ill person whose sudden civic
duty it was to control and detain. This is how my life crashed.

My paranoid schizophrenia
voided my daily experience of true living and settled in with voices
from the spirit world. My disability took on a new dimension as
voices only came from people in the material world before this. These
new voices took my time and my attention so that I was unable to
measure my life and at some points unable to measure time. Life
events were seemingly non-existent. The value and the meaning of life
became shabby. Emptiness was my master and I was its slave.

During the time period
directly following my life crashing, I began to finally gain a
feeling of understanding through the spirit world voices. They
explained a whole new domain of delusion to me which justified
everything that I had previously believed. Finally, I began to relax
because I no longer felt the desperation of not comprehending.

Currently, I have a more
developed understanding and realistic relationship with my
disability. The goal is to close the gap of emptiness with a hobby or
interest that I can share with others and hopefully earn some money
with. The concept that I am pursuing is to teach myself how to make
wedding gowns and eventually to design originals. Of course, I will
take this very personally as it will redefine who I am by what I
think about and do routinely. My attention will be mine again.